20+ Times People Had Genius Ideas That Are So Crazy They Might Actually Work

History is awash with examples of incredible discoveries, inventions and innovations that we take for granted today, but were widely mocked as crazy when they first came to light. Maybe, just maybe, there is future genius hidden in some of these ideas, taken from the subreddit CrazyIdeas.

I mean, who thought that injecting people with a benign form of disease to immunize them was a good idea at first? Or putting wings on a tube and attempting to fly in it? Absolute madness!

What we have here is a list a crackpot ideas that nobody could ever take seriously. Or could they? Some are undoubtedly just stupid and funny, others are actually rather insightful. There is even the odd nugget of genius where you think “hey, that could actually work!”

Scroll down to check out the latest batch of crazy ideas from the internet’s hive mind, and don’t forget to vote for your favourites!

A reality show idea with gay men.

11 gay men and 1 straight man are locked in a house. The object for the gay men is to find out who isn’t gay. Once a week someone gets outvoted, until 2 are left, or the straight man is out. If the gays manage to outvote him, they win 1 million dollars. If the straight man is among the 2 last people in the house in the end, he wins 1 million dollars.

Now here’s the twist: None of the men are actually gay, they just all think they are the one straight man.

Let’s get a team of people in neon green morph suits to break into a news room an harass the weather man. No one at home will have any idea what’s happening.

Pet stores should have an empty reptile cage labeled “chameleon” to see how long people will stand and look.

Mandatory training for police: They each visit another precinct as a prisoner, can’t tell those cops the truth, they experience the other side of things. Other officers never know who’s a cop or perp, and the experience will remind officers that we’re all human.

Google should tell you if you’re the first person to ever Google something.

They should have a TV show called “Help, I’m Wasting My Life” where relatively smart, talented people who are doing nothing useful with their skills are given life makeovers and useful jobs.

Remove the drinking age, make it so that you have to graduate highschool to legally drink. Increase graduation rates all over the country.

Abolish Leap Day. Instead, every 1000 years have one year with 615 days.

Write a book called How to Fix a Wonky Table. All the pages are blank, except for the first one that says: put this under one of the legs. It will have perforated pages they can be ripped out to fit any table.

An army of twitter bots that reply to every Trump tweet with ‘shut up’

Get all the one hit wonder bands together for a massive concert where they each only play their one song.

A TV show called String Theory where every episode has the same beginning and slowly deviates in a unique way.

Bring back The Joy of Painting, with Terry Crews as the host.

Google’s Self Driving Car should have an incognito mode where it tints all your windows.

A videogame which seems like a kiddy adventure game, as long as you follow the linear path the story has set you. The more you deviate from the main storyline path, the more unsettling, creepy, and horrific the game gets.

Donate 1000 shirts with your face on it to your Goodwill and see how long it takes to see a person wearing one in public

If wiki needs money so badly they should shut down for a couple days and scare everyone into donating.

Start a western themed bar, where the music stops randomly when the door opens, so that everyone can turn around and look at who entered and then go back to their drinks.

The US must have two Presidents at all times (one democrat, one republican). They share a bunk bed in the white house.

an app that keeps track of songs that you skip the most and suggest that you delete them at the end of every week.

After a government shutdown all active members of congress should be ineligible for reelection.

Slip a resignation letter on Donald Trump’s desk with the words “Executive Order” at the top; see his response when he signs it.

An app that shows you what your body will look like in two months time of working out. Every time you skip a workout the image of you gets less and less fit.

Pay prisons by the time ex-inmates stay crime-free after release

Let people donate blood instead of paying small fines like parking tickets.

Can’t think of the title of a song? Perform the song yourself and release it as your own. Wait a few weeks until you get sued by the artist; they’ll say the name of the song in the lawsuit.

Hire a group of attractive males and females to roam individually around the city. Their job is to smile, make eye contact with, and complement strangers in order to increase morale and general mental well being.

I should install switches on my car’s dash that don’t do anything. When someone gets in my car I’ll look them dead in the eye and say “Buckle up.” I’ll start flipping switches in what appears to be a purposeful order, then I’ll drive like a grandma while avoiding any conversation about the switches.

Power wash the Statue of Liberty to return it back to it’s original copper color

Make a Batman movie but don’t announce the name of the actor playing Bruce Wayne. Then the audience will be exactly like the people of Gotham.

Everyone should search on Whitehouse.gov for ‘tiny hands’ so that it shows up as the top rated search.

Create an app called Bros Worldwide. It’s like a dating site but for finding some bros to chill with when you travel. If you are at home and bored you fire up the app and see if any foreign tourists are in your town that want to get drunk and party with the locals.

If your last name is Mann, name all your kids Spider, Super, Bat, Iron, etc. Name the youngest Hugh.

A place called The “Coffee” Shop that serves alcohol in coffee cups, and everyone just pretends it’s a normal coffee shop even though they’re totally wasted.

A bed that gradually angles itself so that by the time you have to be awake, you’re already standing. Sleep any longer and it makes you fall on your face.

Make a handy guide of Democratic and Republican talking points so instead of having a big argument, you could just say, “#4” and the other person could say, “#8 contradicts that” and we’d save time because no one is going to change their f*cking mind anyway.

We should start using “digital penetration” as a term for hacking until it becomes so popular that Fox News and CNN are saying it on-air.

Taken 3. Set in a Buddhist monastery. Having found his daughter and wife in the previous movies, Liam Neeson embarks on an existential journey… to find himself.

An app that runs in the background and plays ever increasing Jaws music the closer you get to a registered sex offender.

Everyone just ignore Donald Trump for the next four years. Like he’s not even there. Ignore him and wait it out.

Reverse Breaking Bad. A TV show where a ruthless drug dealer slowly becomes a mild mannered school teacher over the course of 5 seasons.

Technically Correct: the game show. contestants will give the answer as further away from the legit answer as possible yet still technically correct.

Deadpool should appear in all future Marvel movies that are rated PG-13 and use their one allotted “f*ck” in a brief cameo.

We all join ISIS so there isn’t anyone left for them to attack. Then we dismantle it from the inside.

Make texting vibration patterns be morse code of the contact’s initials, so you learn morse code over time and have an immediate idea of who texted you

A Matrix Prequel where Neo keeps choosing the blue pill over and over again and Morpheus keeps going back with a new argument for the red pill.

Create a gym for only fat people. It’s a safe space and they can feel comfortable there. When thy lose enough weight or their BMI drops to a certain level their membership is canceled.

A porn video where a woman orders a pizza, pays with money. Then She has a plumber come, fix her faucet, get paid with money, then leaves. After many such psych-outs, she finally goes to bed and has sex with her loving husband.

Now that our search history is for sale we should crowd fund and buy politicians web histories and post them publicly.My thought is they always claim they have nothing to hide so let’s post everything.

Hire a female prostitute, tell her to meet you at a fancy restaurant, and ask her to pretend to be your colleague from the bank. Hire a male prostitute, and tell him the same thing. Reserve the table next to theirs and listen to them trying to improvise sexy bank-themed dialogue at each other.

Get a bumper sticker that says “Honk if you think I am doing an excellent job driving.” Then you can cut people off and they won’t know what to do.

And wouldnâ€™t it be hilarious if all of a sudden, out of nowhere, in 2017, people were suddenly using Myspace again?

No one would ever see it coming.

Jimmy Johns should randomly deliver a sub once in a while to someone and say “We’re so fast, we got your sandwich here before you even knew you wanted one!”

Call a pest control place and say your attic is filled with bats, but instead fill your attic with Baseball Bats. also im drunk.

Make a beer callled “Responsibly” and market it with the slogan “Drink Responsibly”

Allow men to donate their nipples to women who’ve damaged theirs. Male nipples now have a purpose.

A televised snowball fight where both teams consist of MLB pitchers.

Show a newborn duckling a mirror so that it thinks it is it’s own mother and proceeds to take over the world because it knows no limits

Overpay your last student loan payment by $25 so that you have an excuse to call the student loan office and demand they give YOUR money back every day for the next 5 years.

Release a breakthrough “autism free” vaccine and market it to anti-vaxxers. Make them exactly the same as current vaccines of course, because it’s not like anti-vaxxers would know the difference. Everyone else just shuts up and goes with it, and the whole world gets vaccinated.

Attach sensors to every car that determine the exact weight of bugs killed while driving. Add up the score at years end and announce the winner on TV. Since bats also kill an impressive amount of bugs, the winner is dubbed Batman and can legally conduct vigilante justice until the next year.

Real life “community challenges”. Ex. Plant 500 million trees by next Sunday and everyone pays 2% less in taxes.

Make Mewtwo available in Pokemon Go for one hour only, at Wal-Mart, on the morning of Black Friday

Don’t put party affiliation on voting ballots, that way people have to actually pay the minimum amount of attention when deciding who to vote for.

Gordon Ramsay should do a series in which he cooks recipes from the Internet, and tries them.

Make a documentary series called “The War, on Drugs” where college professors of 20th century history discuss WWI while smoking weed, dropping acid, and eating shrooms.

Hire two hit men to kill each other. Hire the winner and another hit man to kill each other. Repeat until you have found the world’s greatest hit man.

Netflix should buy a large movie theater chain. Rename it Netflix. Free admission for Netflix subscribers, otherwise tickets are $5. Popcorn and Soda sold at cost.

Announce Ryan Reynolds has dropped out of the “Deadpool” sequel (following the director), 3 days later announce the new actor cast in his place, Brian Ronalds (Ryan Reynolds with a cheap fake mustache). Keep up the charade for the entirety of the marketing, and have the mustache appear in the movie.

A waterpark for adults only. More extreme slides. A wave pool that has huge waves. Alcohol everywhere. And a normal lazy river.

Publish your browsing data as a book, so ISPs would be infringing your copyright by selling your browsing data.

PM the constitution to each other so the NSA will read it.

Have Alexa respond to random laughter with laughter of her own.

A jalapeÃ±o-shaped piÃ±ata, called a jalapiÃ±ata, that douses partygoers with mace when it’s busted open.

“Topless & Wet”, a smoothie bar where none of the blenders have lids.

A dryer that uses your lindt to make wool (like) socks. Once it has enough material it’ll just add a sock to your load

A hamster ball filled with water so your pet octopus can walk around the house

Kanye should host a event to raise Dyslexia awareness in Kenya

Take a girl on a first date to couples counseling.

Delete any post that gets more than 2000 upvotes on /r/mildlyinteresting, since it is too interesting.

Walk around in public wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and a “Black Lives Matter” T-Shirt and just see what happens.

An airhorn that looks like a Febreze can do you’ll always know when someone poops at your house.

Prank people who have just come out of a coma. Get the doctors to dress like confederate soldiers. Dress an old lady in American 1862 garb and have her claim to be the patients wife. Explain- “you were hit by cannon fire in March 1861”

A museum for dogs featuring rare and fascinating odors from around the world.

A website to match up your upvotes with other people to find your closest match based on similar votes

Have a medieval-fantasy tv show (like Game of Thrones), but everyone in that fantasy world has smartphones and texting. There should be no explanation why the technology exists, and it won’t be a comedy. Just a serious dramatic story with knights and kings and everything, but with smartphones.

Challenge all White Nationalists and Neo Nazis to fight each other to the death for title of Whitest, Neoest Nazi

Obama hosts the next season of The Apprentice

In four years when Tokyo has the Olympics, they should have Godzilla light the final Olympic Flame.

To Disney – Donâ€™t release any trailers or details for Star Wars episode 9, just have blank posters that say Star Wars episode 9 on posters and have 30 second long silent commercials that only say Star Wars episode 9, nothing else.

Netflix should cast Danny DeVito as Frank Underwood in season 5 of House of Cards and not acknowledge the change

How to win the war on drugs: Legalize all drugs then require that all drugs be purchased through Comcast customer service.

It’s been 10 years since “To Catch a Predator”. Make a Hollywood celebrity special.

Subway should create a subsidiary called Domway where they tell you what kind of sandwich you’re going to eat.

Netflix should have a “Least Popular” category, so that people can either A: watch movies nobody’s seen, or B. watch movies that they kinda feel sorry for.

Shut down the /r/conspiracy sub. Give no explanation.

Hold a 5k race for Julian Assange doppelgÃ¤ngers and have it start at the Ecuadorian embassy.

Walk into a bank and request a $10,000,000 loan for the purpose of opening a competing bank.

Make Betsy DeVos go through every grade of public school, Billy Madison style.

If you can buy politicians, why not have a crowd funding to buy them for the interests of the people?

A TV show called “Pilot”, where every episode is a different setting and plot with the same actors every time.

Go to a gloryhole and push carrots and cucumbers through the opening. Refuse to leave saying, “no dessert until you finish your vegetables”.

A house buying show where the buyers are millennials and they can’t afford any of the houses

If you are ever going to be drafted for a war, get â€œf*ck youâ€ tattooed on the outside of your right pinky. You wonâ€™t be able to salute without showing your superior your tattoo and theyâ€™ll refuse your draft.

A new video game where you play someone with no skills and no weapons. The object is to get killed as fast as possible while a heavily armed badass tries to protect you. Call it “Escort Mission”

Turn the concept of ‘ELI5’ into a game-show: contestants attempt to explain complex ideas to an actual five-year-old, then the kid attempts to explain those concept to a panel of judges, who eliminate contestants based on how well their kid explained the concept that they were taught.

You know how “Christian rock” is a genre? We should totally make Muslim rap into its own genre and have a music festival called “I-Slam”.

Find a Bible, replace all instances of the word ‘Father’ with ‘Daddy’

A Romeo and Juliet parody where a fedora-wearing neckbeard and an easily triggered tumblrinia fall in love, but the corresponding websites forbid their relationship.

Have the current president attempt to pass the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

Bad driver laser tagging: if a driver gets tagged by more than 5 other drivers in an hour, their car is slowed down and morphed into a penis themed PT Cruiser for the rest of the day. Also, car morphing. That needs to be a thing first.

Give inner city gang members free paintball guns and paintballs and see if they’ll agree to use them for a month instead of real guns, and respect the results as if they were real.

Olympic Games with random people from each country so everyone has a reason to stay fit in case they get picked.

Cryptomatic360 [Front End]MonthlyFinally, You Too Can Get Your Hands On The Secret Weapon For Turning $300 into $78,000 in less than 60 days In The Bitcoin And Other Cryptocurrencies Market.... Even If you Have Never Bought Or Traded In Any Cryptocurrency Before

InstaGenius ProWordpress plugin that finds customers and automatically follows up with them, tracking prices and selling it to them when their requested products go on sale - or recommended items become available.

Email Force - AgencyEmail Force is built on the same ROBUST platform as the Converzly Copy Engine. It’s super simple to use because it uses the same automation technology.
It’ll quickly and effortlessly create you profitable emails for ANY product you’re promoting, in any ni

DFY Chief + Video Chief GS ProProfit $500 - $1,000 Per Video By Leveraging One of The Largest Library of Pre-Made Videos, Script Templates, VoiceOver Templates And More…Instantly Access Over 600 High-Converting Templates Spread Across More Than A Dozen Of The Hottest Niches!